Ed. note: Freelancer John McReynolds took a couple-year hiatus from Sun projects to work on an independent book: Vanished: Lompoc’s Japanese. He explored what happened locally in the days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the anniversary of which was just a few days ago.
The following story is an excerpt from his book. Copies are available at the Santa Maria library’s gift shop, at the Book Store in Lompoc, and at the Book Loft in Solvang. For more information, visit vanishedlompocsjapanese.com.
“I was working at the gas station,” Kenji Ota recalls of Sunday, December 7, 1941. The onetime Lompoc High football player is now a martial arts and ballroom dance instructor in Goleta, California. “Some customers driving by were a little upset. Everybody was upset. They drove up to the gas pumps and they’d see who it was and they’d step on the gas and get out of there.”
Miyeko Jean Nakashima’s playground was always across the field at Ryon Park. She does not remember going to the park that day. “My parents were devastated,” she says. “Having two children still in Japan, my mother was really devastated.”
“December 7 scared me to death,” confides Sumi Tashiro, the girl basketball standout. “I was in Santa Barbara, in beauty college, and I worked for the Trudells who had a wholesale flower shop. My friend and I were going to the movies and Mrs. Trudell said ‘I don’t see why you can’t go,’ but people were going crazy.” Sumi heard fearful talk of submarines and amphibious landings on the Santa Barbara beach front, and glimpsed hateful stares. “I kind of wished I weren’t Japanese at that time, it was so frightening.”
In early-morning raids the day after Pearl Harbor more than 1,200 Issei were arrested nationwide by the FBI. One of them was seized in Lompoc Sunday night. He was Jitsutaro “James” Tokuyama, Lompoc division chief of Guadalupe Produce. Tokuyama’s quick arrest, and that of 14 Issei leaders in the Santa Maria Valley,
including two of the three owners of GP, seemed to confirm suspicions among the Hakujin that Tokuyama, more likely than any other of the Lompoc Japanese, was surely a spy. Evidence for that conclusion, Tokuyama’s executive position with GP, his support for Buddhism instead of Christianity in his Lompoc church, or some other tipoff, can only be surmised. But if he were not a foreign agent, why would he have been arrested so quickly, people asked. And if he were a foreign agent, by implication, so were others. “How many more are there?” whispered the fearmongers.
“There were signs in stores you wouldn’t believe,” remembers Hatsue Marian Nishimura. The reaction to her father at the Rotary club has gone unrecorded but she can recall a story her brother brought home. “My brother went to school the day after Pearl Harbor. When he came home he said, ‘I don’t want to go to school any more. Nobody will sit with me. He was seven years old.” Her brother Kenzo remembers it well.
It was the grammar school in Lompoc, first grade because I was almost six years old. I don’t remember the exact words, but we were in the school yard starting to have lunch and I was waiting for my sister who was supposed to join me. I remember crying because kids were calling me a “dirty Jap.” There were no teachers to intervene. I went home and asked Mom “what is a dirty Jap?” I told my mother I was never going back to school and I did not return. I remember Mom telling me to disregard it, which was not very consoling to me as I cannot forget it even though I am now 75!
At the Burpee Seed Company on Floradale Road outside of Lompoc, manager Bill Hoag wrote to the home office in Philadelphia:
There is a great deal of bitterness being expressed toward the Japanese. I cannot imagine our men at Floradale feeling good working with them and no doubt the sentiment of the community will be against us. … I have told Sakanashi, our Japanese foreman, that Floradale will continue on with him and his men for the time being and that I would take up matters with our Philadelphia office.
A Japanese-American worker at Guadalupe Produce was interviewed by author Dorothy Swaine Thomas:
The second day after Pearl Harbor I didn’t want to go back to work because I was still scared. But my parents felt that we had an obligation to our work, so they said we had better go. The crew cutting the broccoli were all Filipinos. Before the war they used to come and help us pack the crates. When we got to the fields, we still felt there was an air of resentment. They parked their cars near us and they looked ugly. We thought sure that the Filipinos would go berserk, but they didn’t come after us. They just ignored us and they didn’t help us load the crates any more. I did not relax from my tension for a couple of weeks.
At the Hinode Store Katie Inouye was summoned home by her worried parents after her first semester at Redlands University. After a campus farewell party, she took a Greyhound bus from Redlands to Los Angeles. “The man said he wasn’t supposed to take me, but he would,” she can remember. At the L.A. bus station her luck ran out. The driver of the route north along the coast refused to let her board. She tried the train with no luck. “I was 17. I felt so lonely lugging around my big suitcase,” she recalls. “They didn’t have wheels on the suitcases then.” After a phone call to Lompoc, her brother-in-law, Victor Inouye, drove south to pick her up. ”I don’t know how he did it with the curfew,” she has wondered for 70 years.
On Friday, December 12, the day after Lompoc’s first blackout, the weekly Lompoc Record published its first edition since Pearl Harbor. On the front page ran a story about Police Chief Peterson ordering all Japanese aliens to report to him for registration and to stay off the street at night. On the same page came a plea from Yeiki Tashiro, the young president of the Lompoc Japanese American Citizens League. “We shall investigate and turn over to authorities all who by word or act consort with the enemy,” he wrote. “The enemy will try to sabotage our usefulness by inciting race hysteria. Let us be vigilant.”
New Buddhist pastor Daisho Tana reported to police headquarters that day as requested and wrote about the encounter in his diary.
I went to the police station in the morning to have my fingerprints taken. Not surprisingly, they asked those of us who were enemy aliens what we had been doing since our arrival in America. They also asked if I had served in the [Japanese] military, if I had brothers in the military, and what I would do if these brothers attacked the United States. I replied that had I been offered the opportunity to acquire American citizenship when I was younger, I would now naturally have fought against my Japanese brothers. They had no concept about the spirit of Japanese bushido, which dictates that one should fight against one’s brother for the sake of one’s lord or country.
Record publisher Ronald Adam called for calm. “In the present REAL emergency—let us keep our heads—and be patient—and tolerant—and practical. We can expect impositions—unfortunate acts by dumbbells in authority—mob acts by scrawny characters in the name of patriotism. It is a time for men and women of character and standing to assert themselves—definitely and patiently.”
But on Monday, December 15, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox trumped Adam by declaring that spy activity in Hawaii prior to the Pearl Harbor attack was the “Most effective fifth column work of the entire war.” His assertions were later proven groundless, but at the time they doused gasoline on the simmering racial tension that spilled over Japanese immigrants and their children.
Terry Wakumoto, a second generation U.S. citizen who six months before had fashioned her brother Noboru a corsage for his prom date, had to endure a science teacher at Lompoc Junior High school who helped stoke the fire.
He would stand up in front of the class and say, “They found the Jap farmers were plowing messages in the field to aid the enemy.” He fuelled the anger toward us. One girl who sat in front of me would turn around and look at me and say “Jap.”
In Lompoc, rumors spread that a Japanese farm worker had been found dead in a field, presumably murdered by a Filipino. Other stories circulated that Japanese students had not stood to salute the flag at Lompoc High School, and that firearms had been found.
According to an account in the Record a Lompoc farm group, ostensibly studying agricultural needs like flooding, detoured into race relations.
The Japanese pay high cash rents and exploit the good soil, it was stated, following practices which harm the land. In order to meet Japanese competition, white families must work harder and accept a lower standard of living.
Business and professional people counseled calm. Dr. Heiges on his rounds to Nikkeijin homes would tell his patients not to worry. The Adam family’s newspaper appealed for reason. Ron Adam’s son Ken, the Record editor, wrote:
Rumors are something that our town has a lot of since the beginning of the war. We have heard the following: that a local police officer was wounded in an exchange of shots with an alien; that Japanese school children have refused to salute the flag; that six Italians have been rounded up for the FBI; that an arsenal was confiscated at an alien-owned store; that concrete gun emplacements were found under certain lettuce crops in the valley; that scores of Japanese aliens have been jailed. After talking with the police chief, we discover that all the stories, while interesting, were much ado about nothing.
But United Press International had many more readers than the Adam family. On the same day as Adam’s anti-rumor column, UPI ran a story backing up Secretary Knox, and alleging that a network of spies had aided the Japanese attackers on Oahu. Worse, many were American citizens.
Japanese of American nationality infiltrated into the police department and obtained jobs as road supervisors, sanitary inspectors, or minor government officials. Many went to work in the post office and telephone service—ideal spots for spies.
The day after Christmas, another Japanese-American letter to the Lompoc Record, this from the Japanese Society at the Presbyterian Church, where seven Japanese-Americans were members, made a “public statement of our faith in, and loyalty to the United States.” It was signed by Kaoru Bill Honda, the basketball coach and Iwamoto bookkeeper, and Laura Shibuya, whose father managed Lompoc Vegetable Union. The same day the Japanese Women’s Association became the first group in town to make a contribution to the Lompoc Defense Council.
But their $50 and the Presbyterians’ letter were lost next to a chilling page one headline that zoomed the war to within 10 short miles of Lompoc—“Tanker Escapes Sub Attack Off Pt. Arguello.” The sub-head read “Jap Submarines Harry Pacific Coast Shipping.” Two Lompoc residents had been eye-witnesses at Point Arguello at 8:30 Monday morning when a submarine fired three torpedoes at a Standard Oil tanker, the H.M. Storey. Fortunately, they missed their target. But the next day less than 100 miles north Standard Oil’s 8,000-ton Montebello was sunk by a torpedo amidst two hours of shelling. Japanese deck guns even fired at the crew as they sat defenseless in their lifeboats. It was the same week the Japanese army began its assault on the Philippines.
Patronage at the West Side Food Center cratered. The few shoppers who ventured inside left refrigerator doors ajar. Food spoiled. Harry and Robert Iwamoto’s family dream melted before their eyes.
John McReynolds is a freelancer. Contact him at lompocwriter@gmail.com.
This article appears in Dec 9-16, 2010.